I have never seen a notification card for these policies that suggested it was symbolic; they all make it sound like a legit attempt at conserving water. Do you have an example of one consistent with your interpretation of the policy?
I don't think that it's officially recognized as such, but it can't be anything else. No one can seriously believe this measure would save any significant amount of water. Not when up to 30% of water is lost in the distribution system [1] due to leaks in decades past their useful life delivery pipes.
If the utilities simply stopped the leakage that would have an enormous impact --but stopping leaks is not visible and it doesn't "mobilize" and it doesn't internalize.
I've learned that it's very easy to overstimate the sophistication of the average person's views. "When people support protectionism, it's because of slogans, not understanding the literature on optimal tariffs" and all that.
How about this: can you give me an example of a conservation promotion card that's more consistent with "it's symbolic" than "this actually helps"?
Most people (rationally) do not spend much time following policy debate.
Most people (rationally) take the actions of the government at face value.
There's just not a large contingent of people out there who are like, "Wait, this is obvious bullshit, OH now I understand that I've been directed to go figure out an actual way to save water." The people who understand that it's bullshit already know better ways to save water. The people who don't know better ways to save water just take it at face value that the government is providing them with reasonably effective approaches to save water.
This isn't a knock on the intelligence of the general public. For the most part, government does work this way. They are correct about the general pattern. Environmentalism seems particularly prone to counterexamples. It is unreasonable to expect busy people who understand correctly that they have very little marginal impact on policy to have dug into policy wonkery enough to know that environmentalism is unusually prone to these kind of ineffective actions.
It can be a deliberate effort by politicians to make it appear as if they are concerned about and actively combating the water shortage, when in fact they are not.
I'm sorry that didn't come across very obviously, but yes, the symbolism is being used to pretend something useful is being done -- which in itself glasses of water amount to nothing, but it makes people think "save water".
Funny thing is journalists reporting on this consistently say idiotic things such as "we should have started this years ago when the drought started" with the implied message that this "measure" is conservationally meaningful.
Whoever are pushing this (pols, journos) likely believe there are believers and thus worth an effort at least for the sake of public opinion. It also superficially makes non believers to some extent feel they are passively involved in good, but really the impact is practically nil. Ffs, shutting the shower head off 15 seconds sooner would save as much.
